Lately there has been a huge discussion about vaccines in the United States. This isn’t a question about whether vaccines are safe or not - but as a philosopher, what are your thoughts on the mandatory requirements for anything - whether they be vaccinations, wearing of purple hats or college application fees?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Question from a listener. | |
| Lately there's been a huge discussion about vaccines in the United States. | |
| This isn't a question about whether vaccines are safe or not, but as a philosopher, what are your thoughts on the mandatory requirements for anything, whether they be vaccinations, wearing of purple hats, or college application fees? | |
| Very interesting question. | |
| I will... | |
| Perhaps foolhardily rush in where angels fear to tread. | |
| I just had a great discussion the day before yesterday with my lovely daughter about the Aristotelian mean. | |
| And that's pretty cool. | |
| So... | |
| I was vaccinated, which doesn't mean anything other than I remember it vividly. | |
| And like all children, had a deep-seated horror of needles. | |
| Almost children, I guess. | |
| And I remember when I was in boarding school from six to eight, I think I was six and a half or seven, when I got the smallpox inoculation, which was a whole repetitive series of needles. | |
| And also, I remember, because I guess little boys can turn just about anything into a macho contest, but when we got another vaccination, you were considered to be courageous if there was very little scratch. | |
| In other words, if you hadn't jerked your arm, if there was very little scratch from the needle, you were considered to be heroic and Conan of the librarian variety. | |
| I always loved that in the map of Conan, Iranistan, I think, was one of the countries which I thought was kind of cool. | |
| Anyway, it was like metalloy in science fiction, just one of these words that seems to keep cropping up in my brain from time to time. | |
| So, I was vaccinated. | |
| I took vaccines before I went to the Middle East. | |
| I took vaccines, if I remember rightly, before I went to China. | |
| And... | |
| So I believe that not only are vaccines safe, for the most part. | |
| Remember, everything's a cost and a benefit. | |
| If you have an adverse reaction to a vaccine, which some people do, of course, then the vaccine is not great for you. | |
| But on the other hand, Roald Dahl was writing, I think, in the 1960s, The Guy Who Wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, and so on, which starts off all right and then becomes really quite a drug trip. | |
| Cloud, people. | |
| Good Lord. | |
| But he had a daughter who was 12. | |
| He was reading her a story one night, and she got sick, and she got worse and worse, and then she just died. | |
| It was measles. | |
| So, again, that's not scientific. | |
| I believe that vaccines, inoculations, are one of the great advances of medical technology. | |
| I mean, as recently as the 1950s, polio was a terrible, terrible scourge on society. | |
| And, of course, as you know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair after a bout with polio. | |
| And it could be spread in public pools and there was a huge amount of, obviously, legitimate terror. | |
| Some people had to spend their whole lives in iron lungs. | |
| It's a giant tube that helps you breathe. | |
| So polio was a terrifying illness. | |
| Smallpox, a huge ravager of human populations. | |
| I mean, you could sort of go on and on. | |
| Measles, mumps, rubella, yeah, could cause mumps in an adult male. | |
| I think it's mumps in adult males can cause sterility. | |
| And, well, that's not good. | |
| So, just, I mean, for the record, and I'm obviously not a doctor, I do know that the Lancet articles that linked autism with measles, mumps, rubella, I think it was, the vaccine... | |
| That they came out in the 90s, and they have been, to my knowledge, thoroughly debunked, discredited. | |
| See, disbunked. | |
| I can do debunked and discredited in the same word, but nobody knows what I'm talking about. | |
| I've been thoroughly debunked and discredited, and so on. | |
| There does seem to be, of course, rising autism in the world, and in the Western world for sure. | |
| I don't know, of course, nobody does, to my knowledge, know what is the cause of it. | |
| Is it better diagnosis? | |
| Is it other factors? | |
| Who knows? | |
| Who knows? | |
| But I would not, in particular, ascribe it to But, you understand, it's my opinion. | |
| It's not a learned opinion. | |
| It's not a philosophical opinion. | |
| It is just my opinion. | |
| People are always asking me about what I think about Vaccines, and of course the only vaccine I deliver is the vaccine, against the giant worldwide plague of superstition and irrationality. | |
| But other than that, I dare not dread. | |
| Further than that, I dare not go for reasons of integrity and sanity. | |
| But as far as mandatory things, that's a very interesting question. | |
| I mean, mandatory? | |
| What is mandatory? | |
| Seatbelts are mandatory in most places now, although the data on seatbelts is not great. | |
| Not great. | |
| Seatbelts in general cause people to drive more dangerously. | |
| And that's fine if you have a seatbelt on and you hit another car. | |
| You both have seatbelts on, but for pedestrians and motorcyclists and bicyclists and animals and so on, the fact that people drive more dangerously when they have a seatbelt is not good. | |
| So it has caused, as far as I understand it, accidents to rise on those who cohabit the road with the cars, but it does not reduce fatalities in cars. | |
| You know, people's behavior, it just adjusts. | |
| There's an argument by an economist that says, he says, well, you, basically, you'd have the same amount of fatalities if everyone drove with a giant sharpened metal spike pointed directly at their chest, because then people would just drive more cautiously, and then they would still have, you know, accidents. | |
| So, there's mandatory stuff. | |
| I don't particularly like it. | |
| Now, There are mandatory behaviors written into contracts. | |
| In fact, contracts are pretty much about mandatory behaviors. | |
| And so, in contracts, yeah, I go rent a car. | |
| To my understanding, they kind of want it back. | |
| So, they have that in contracts. | |
| There are lots of behaviors about what you can and can't do with the apartment. | |
| That you rent or the tools that you rent. | |
| And there are implied contracts such as if I lend you my lawnmower, I don't want you putting it for sale on eBay and pocketing the proceeds. | |
| Even though we may not have a formal contract, that would be considered double plus ungood, I think, by any reasonable person. | |
| There are implicit contracts in restaurants. | |
| You don't have to sign a contract promising to pay for the meal, but it's kind of assumed that you will, and if you don't, even though there's no contract, there's no contract that says you can't steal when you go into a store. | |
| Anyway, you sort of get the idea. | |
| So there are contracts, and the degree to which we need governments to enforce mandatory standards is the degree to which property is not private, you see. | |
| It's not private. | |
| Because I'm sometimes asked about car insurance. | |
| Would you, in a free society, would you be required to have car insurance? | |
| Well, I mean, in a free society, saying that something is required is pretty tricky. | |
| It's pretty tricky. | |
| And the reason for that, obviously, is there's no central agency with the infinite power of police and courts and prisons to enforce mandatory standards on every sentient being within its geographical grasp. | |
| So, no. | |
| You can't sort of say, well, there's a central agency that will enforce things. | |
| And that's good, in my opinion, because that one's more than my opinion, just to be fair. | |
| But that is... | |
| It's funny, I say it in my humble opinion with my daughter sometimes, and she actually thought I was trying to make some kind of joke, and she said it wasn't funny, and I said, I agree. | |
| And we had to go over the words humble and opinion, and fascinating stuff. | |
| It's so great to share philosophy with kids. | |
| That's absolutely, and they're so delightful and so eager and so curious and so skeptical. | |
| Oh, delicious. | |
| So, there's an old saying that says, the conjunction of ruling and dreaming is tyranny. | |
| The ideal man, the master race, the triumph of the proletariat, that, you know, human beings are going to be different than they somehow are, you know. | |
| Well, we take exactly the same people, we make them wear seatbelts and we'll reduce fatalities. | |
| No, you won't. | |
| You'll just increase fatalities for those who aren't in cars. | |
| But the question is, with something like car insurance, well, how would that work in a free society? | |
| Of course, the answer is I don't know, because if I knew how everything worked in a free society, I should be a dictator of the world, and that's an impossible task and an impossible set of knowledge to even dream of having. | |
| But the question is, would you like to drive on roads where other people had insurance? | |
| Well, I bet you would. | |
| I would. | |
| I would prefer that people I drive on roads with have insurance. | |
| Because if they crash into my car, and they don't have insurance, then I have to pay for my own thing. | |
| Of course, my insurance I could cover for myself, but if I have to get insurance that covers me in the event of someone else crashing into me, it's much more expensive than if it's just me crashing into someone else. | |
| So no, I... I'm not a big fan of this sort of central agency thing, it doesn't really work, and it generally produces, it's dreaming plus ruling, which equals tyranny. | |
| But if the roads are private, then the condition of driving on a private road is that you have insurance. | |
| Easy peasy, nice and easy. | |
| Now, of course, there will be people who don't have insurance and drive on private roads and blah-de-blah-de-blah. | |
| And there would be certain sanctions against those people. | |
| And remember that the ultimate sanction is you would become a persona non grata in... | |
| Humanus economis, right? | |
| In the economic life of your society. | |
| And nobody will trade with you. | |
| Nobody will deal with you. | |
| Until you make amends for whatever wrong you've done. | |
| So, these are how things can work with seatbelts. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Do you really want to drive on a road with other people who have seatbelts? | |
| I'm mixed. | |
| I mean, just partly because, you know, he's had a drum drilled into me so many times, wear seatbelts, wear seatbelts. | |
| Now, I remember these terrifying commercials when I was a kid in England of, you know, guys with smashed up pizza faces breathing through tubes and drunk driving or not wearing seatbelts or whatever. | |
| I generally prefer it when other drivers are more cautious, so... | |
| I would not like to drive on a road where people did or did not have to wear seatbelts. | |
| But, you know, that wouldn't fundamentally be up to me. | |
| It would be up to market demand and generally what would be the most profitable for people, for the owners of the roads and for the insurance companies and so on. | |
| Now, when it comes to inoculations... | |
| I don't believe that people should be forced to have inoculations and to believe that would be like to imagine an entity in a free society that would be capable of inflicting that and that entity would not exist. | |
| So it would be like praying to Zeus. | |
| So the way I imagine it would work is if there was some sort of educational organization in a free society that involved schooling or something like that. | |
| I don't know if there would or wouldn't but there being a school or something. | |
| Then the school would have to appeal to parents, and if there were non-inoculated kids who might get the illness, carry the illness, come to school, and so on, well, of course, your kids would be inoculated, so it wouldn't be so bad, but would... | |
| Parents like to have an environment in their kids' school where the other kids were inoculated against some major and debilitating illnesses. | |
| Well, yeah, of course. | |
| Of course they would. | |
| Or maybe they wouldn't. | |
| Sorry to be annoying, but maybe they wouldn't. | |
| Maybe they don't like vaccines and they want all their kids to be unvaccinated. | |
| And this would be the case that you would make meeting the market demand of the parents. | |
| They would simply sign... | |
| A contract that the school, releasing the school from all liability should their children get sick from being at school, that that would be the reality. | |
| I mean, just have to release the school from all liability for those things and that would be for the market to decide. | |
| So, as far as these standards go, well, the more private property there is in the world, the more standards can be developed and Given that there would have to be a standardization in order to be enforceable, | |
| that there would just be sort of the minimum template standards, you know, and places would advertise and say, we conform to, you know, Steph Rules 101 or whatever the sort of standard minimum for contracts is, you know, by entering the store, you agree to these three things or whatever, whatever the minimum would be, and people would slap that sticker on their store. | |
| In order to help you to feel comfortable that they didn't make up some weird rule that would have you liable for something that you would never assume would happen, you know? | |
| If you don't order wine with your meal, it's quadruple the price for your entree, whatever, right? | |
| They just have to follow these sort of basic minimum rules that would be rubber-stamped and wouldn't be like the 59-page Apple Eula or whatever. | |
| They just follow the basic bare minimum and they would advertise that and that would be how people would be comfortable knowing that there wasn't some weird kink in... | |
| The implicit or explicit contract. | |
| So I think that's how standards get developed in a free society. | |
| There's private property and people who build roads, they want you to drive on their roads, obviously. | |
| They really, really do want you to drive on their roads. | |
| And so they have to appeal to that which makes you driving on their roads the best possible experience. | |
| Now, that could mean no rules at all. | |
| I did the show on this years ago. | |
| Someplace up in the Nordic countries, there's a town that has just eliminated traffic lanes, traffic signs. | |
| They just have this crazy rat's maze of traffic commandments and worked badly and all that. | |
| And they got rid of them all, and traffic flow is faster, traffic accidents and injuries are down, and all this kind of cool stuff. | |
| So, that is something that could happen. | |
| It could just be, here you go! | |
| Good luck! | |
| And no speed limits, no speed minimums, no lanes. | |
| Now, it could be. | |
| Or it could be that things are slightly structured or more structured. | |
| Well, they'll tinker, right? | |
| Once you've got a government, your tinkering kind of stops. | |
| And so they'll have these standards that will make it as easy and pleasurable as possible to use their roads or to rent their cars or any of that kind of stuff. | |
| And bare minimum for maximum enjoyment. | |
| I guess this is the condom principle. | |
| Bare minimum protection for maximum enjoyment. | |
| That's how standards get developed. | |
| And changing them would be considerably challenging. | |
| And I don't think that that would happen maybe once a generation or something if some wild new technology came along. | |
| But you'd really want to keep things as simple as possible. | |
| I mean, imagine informing the population that had a certain set of rules taken for granted that new rules were occurring, or there'd been a change in the rules, and that would be a huge amount of work. | |
| So there'd be a lot of time and effort put into making the rules as comprehensive and simple as possible so that everyone could understand them. | |
| And then they would really only very rarely change, I would imagine. | |
| You know, like imperial to metric, just because imperial measurements were just so badly designed. | |
| They weren't even designed. | |
| Yard was like the tip of the king's nose, the tip of his fingers. | |
| I don't know, maybe that's a historical myth, but it all just seemed quite a hodgepodge. | |
| So, the question is not which rules will be imposed in a free society. | |
| Because that's looking at it like which meals will be imposed on you at a restaurant. | |
| Which cars will be imposed on you in a free market? | |
| Well, because it's not a free market in cars anymore, because they've been kind of making them into death traps to meet the government's lightweight requirements to reduce gas consumption. | |
| But it's like saying which websites will be inflicted on your browser, assuming it's not endless pop-ups. | |
| Oh, look, I have a caveat for every statement. | |
| But it's not which rules will be imposed. | |
| It's which rules will you find the most beneficial? | |
| Which restrictions, which standards will you find the most beneficial? | |
| Do you want your child to be taught a foreign language? | |
| Well, that's... | |
| That's up to you, of course, right? | |
| In a free society. | |
| It's like saying, you know, which musical instrument, if any, will be imposed upon you when you're an adult? | |
| It's like, no, you can choose to learn an instrument or not. | |
| It's your choice. | |
| It's not imposed upon you. | |
| You choose it. | |
| Which instrument do you want, if any? | |
| And it's hard for us to get to that mindset that we, as a consumer, Would not be a dictator because, you know, our dollar would be... | |
| Or our currency, for the non-dollar users, our currency would be one of many currency votes in existence. | |
| And if we wanted them all right next to our house, it's doubtful that we could generate the economic activity required to sustain it if we alone would be using it. | |
| And... | |
| So all of that stuff is really, it's a weird mindset to change. | |
| How will rules be imposed in the absence of a government? | |
| Well, people like structure. | |
| People like predictability. | |
| People like knowing where they stand. | |
| And there is a market for rules. | |
| And it's a negotiated market which is designed to provide the optimum experience for the buyer and the seller. | |
| The government is not designed to provide the optimum experience for everyone. | |
| Some people receive government goodies, some people are forced to pay for them, or their kids are put into debt for them, or whatever. | |
| So it's win-lose with the government, just simply because it doesn't create. | |
| It's a negative-sum game, right? | |
| I mean, a government transfers from Peter to Paul and takes a good portion of that transfer for itself, and because it is a coercive transfer mechanism, it is a... | |
| A net loss to society as a whole, a specific gain to an individual, and a loss to the individuals who have to pay for it. | |
| It's sort of like a thief. | |
| A thief who goes and steals a candy bar has a candy bar, and he has gained from that transaction with having a candy bar without having to pay for it. | |
| The store owner is out of candy bar, and the store owner, his quality of life is diminished to a tiny degree, and then he has to put in all of these cameras and, right, anti-theft devices, maybe not in candy bars, but you know what I mean. | |
| And therefore society is a whole loser because all of the The jerk tax in society is prodigious, right? | |
| I remember when I was a DJ at my college radio station way back in the day, there was a guy there who told me with great excitement, because ATM cards had just come out, bank cards had just come out, and he figured out how you could open up a whole bunch of bank accounts and you could go and take out the maximum. | |
| From each bank account, even if you didn't have enough money in it, because when they first came out, they didn't check your balance, right? | |
| Oh, you want $100? | |
| Here's $100, right? | |
| And you could go and... | |
| I don't know how this was his... | |
| I don't know if this was his idea or something he'd done or whatever, but he was very excited about all of that and all that could be achieved with these fake bank accounts and taking out lots of money. | |
| It didn't seem like a great plan to me, but also immoral. | |
| But, of course, what happened was some people obviously tried to do this and then the banks had to put in the technology to pin your account and see if you had enough to cover what you wanted, which was a cost. | |
| Increased bank fees and cost for everyone else. | |
| Reduced payouts and interest. | |
| Just a cost. | |
| You know, it's just a jerk tax. | |
| People who want something for nothing make everyone pay for everything. | |
| So think of rules in society as something that is negotiated between buyer and seller, between interested parties, to the maximum enjoyment and profit of both. | |
| And it allows for significant flexibility. | |
| And, you know, this doesn't include things like, you know, let's have a town where murder is allowed, right? | |
| I mean, that's not going to... | |
| It's not going to happen. | |
| People aren't going to want that. | |
| And nobody's going to build there. | |
| Nobody would want to buy there. | |
| So, with the exception of rape, theft, murder, assault, and fraud, the rules are negotiated. | |
| And, of course, it sounds exhausting to negotiate for everything you do. | |
| Well, we do that to some degree, number one. | |
| And number two... | |
| That is another market, which is how to simplify these complex negotiations so that people feel comfortable, you know, like sign once and you're accepted everywhere kind of thing. | |
| So I hope that makes sense. | |
| It's an interesting question. | |
| Please let me know what you think. | |
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| Take care, everyone. |